The New Yorker:

The true locus of the President’s humiliation onstage was not his misbegotten words but the sorry pictures he made with his face.

By Vinson Cunningham

The next-day freakout, livid as the most regrettable hangover, over President Joe Biden’s performance in Thursday night’s debate, has largely focussed, understandably, on words. Too many times, Biden’s sentences meandered outward in odd ellipses from the center of their meaning, or petered out softly like a kite losing wind. He talked inanely about Roe v. Wade having “three trimesters.” After a Biden answer about border security, his opposite number, Donald Trump—as ever, a creep—told one of the only truths that passed his lips all night: “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said, either.” It’s inescapable: syntax, often a challenge for Biden, even in his younger years, betrayed him at the debate.

The true locus of Biden’s humiliation on CNN, however, was not words but the series of sorry pictures he made with his face. Long after his misbegotten locutions are forgotten, I will remember the lost, misty mooniness in Biden’s eyes. When Trump was speaking—always an opportunity for his opponent to convey a frank, relatable disbelief at the stream of lies that inevitably pours forth—Biden’s face was often frozen: wide eyes, vague expression, slack mouth. He looked like he’d just remembered something of drastic domestic importance—the combination to the safe in his bedroom closet, the location of a lost key—and was in the process of forgetting it again. When he spoke, he seemed almost surprised—those eyes again!—to be hearing the hoarse sound of his own voice.

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